Hacker News Reader

Marketing expertise. They are good at:

- Initially low prices that go up at renewal time

- Cross sell and upsell

- Stickiness. Like the (since removed) 60 day lock on domains if you changed the whois info...even if it was removing privacy so you could transfer it.

- Affiliate (kickback) programs

- Advertising

View on HN

They also use real people to call and remind people to renew and upsell. Probably annoying to HN demographic, but that is pretty savvy business foresight for the rest of the universe. Part of market building and maintance, the "ignore that customers are real people you can talk to" attitude of many shops like Google are a reality distortion.

The 60 day lock is mandated by ICANN, not Godaddy. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-03-07-en

The ICANN policy is 60 days after TRANSFER. GoDaddy extended that to include "any change to whois data". ICANN, in fact, issued several advisories to stop this sort of thing.

Interestingly enough, the CIRA (.ca domains) implemented a policy that says quite the opposite. Any domain changes result in a 60 day lock.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com